A Nigerian variant of the B.1.525 strain of the virus was recently discovered in Guangdong Province, China, in nasopharyngeal swab samples from two patients with confirmed new crowns. When the strain was discovered in Italy earlier this month, Italian virus experts said it was so mutable and transmissible that no existing vaccines were effective against it.
The Guangdong CDC’s announcement of the New crown outbreak on the 14th mentioned that the center found the B.1.525 Nigerian variant strain of the virus in nasopharyngeal swabs from two confirmed patients who had moved in from abroad last Friday. The news drew widespread attention from the outside world.
The Central News Agency reported that the B.1.525 Nigerian variant is currently circulating in 26 countries and is more infectious than other types of New Coronavirus and is prone to “antibody neutralization and escape”. This means that people who have already recovered from a Newcastle infection may be re-infected with this variant as well.
The B.1.525 variant was first identified in Nigeria in mid-December 2020. Scientists discovered the strain at the Time while analyzing swab samples from two confirmed Nigerian patients and later named it B.1.525. Within two months after that, more than 20 percent of patients infected with New Crown in Nigeria were infected with the B.1.525 strain, and the variant was soon discovered in the United Kingdom, France and elsewhere.
On March 3 of this year, Arnaldo Caruso, president of the Italian Society of Virology, confirmed to the public that the B.1.52 Nigerian variant strain was found in Brescia, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. According to Caruso, the new virus is so mutable that existing vaccines for the new crown are ineffective against it.
Publicly available information shows that scientists have found that the mutations that occur in the B.1.525 strain include the D614G mutation and the E484K mutation, which have previously been found in other mutant strains, both of which greatly enhance the infectivity of the virus, causing infected individuals to become approximately 3 times more resistant to several existing vaccines and 10 times more resistant to most recovery antibodies.
The major mutation in strain B.1.525, on the other hand, is the presence of aminoglycan substitutions in Q52R and A67 of the N-terminal structural domain of the S protein, as well as deletions at sites 69-70 and 144. Since the N-terminal structural domain of the new crown is highly antigenic, mutations in this region could easily lead to the occurrence of antibody neutralization and escape, thus rendering the vaccine ineffective against this virus.
In addition, B.1.525 has a large number of mutations in the genomic regions that make up other proteins, and the consequence of all these mutations is that they lead to the occurrence of antibody neutralization and escape.
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